Try typing ‘curating as a man’ and ‘curating as a woman’ on Google search and two opposite worlds pop up. The first takes you to the world of haut couture inhabited by fashionable men, where it is not they who wear the suits but it is the suits that carry them. ‘Curating as a woman,’ on the other hand, takes you towards a serious journey across the thickets of a heavy feminist discourse, punctuated by ponderings about exclusion, erasure and the demands of the emancipatory. The contrast between the ‘light’ and the ‘heavy’ kinds of curating around gender difference that this search machine signals, leaks the contradiction of the current neoliberalism in very ‘real’ terms.
Ironically, it is the ‘curator as a man’ who best betrays alienation that the curator of the 2018 Kochi Biennale, Anita Dube, foreground in her concept note on Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life. Alienation springs from the inequalities of the late capitalist world which have spread their tentacles globally, but in the world of high fashion, the power relations are inverted. In fact, in this upside-down world of the spectacle, even race is capitalized upon: black men are shown as sporting a designer wear and flaunting it across Florence, Vienna, Paris et al. Capitalism is at its neurotic best, hiding its contradictions and in fact turning the contradictions into a yet another saleable commodity! The very order of the world that Guy Debord mocked at in the Society of Spectacle flourishes in different guises today, unabashedly, while our planet appears to be whirling deeper and deeper into an ecological black hole.
This is indeed a time for lamentation and confrontation of the stubborn and relentless resilience of the exploitative structures of global capitalism, even if both society and the art world have outlived Debord’s model. [1] But what does it all mean from our location in the global south where all kinds of marginalities crisscross and thrive?
With Dube’s claim that “we are all in this mess together”, even the distinctions between the global north and the global north become facile. This mess is a complex tangle of many marginalities arising from class, gender, caste, race, sexuality and religion. What then turns out to be a daunting question is how do these complex coordinates of power shape one another? In some cases, gender zooms to the fore, and in others, race and class intertwine and yet in others, it can be sexuality and caste and so on. Does this Biennale make us sit with a check list of these shifting equations of inequalities and their endless permutations that block the way to a non-alienated life?
The Biennale takes on the challenge of combining pedagogy with pleasure. Yet, a heaviness hangs in the air. It is this heaviness that I will address both as a phenomenological affect and a discursive effect. When I entered the venues of Kochi Biennale, Aspinwall House, Pepper House, David Hall et al, it was hard not to think of the gender of the artistic director of a biennale of the global south; women curators are a rare event even in many of the biennales and the Documentas of the global north. In 1997 when Catherine David curated Documenta X, the press continually highlighted her gender much to the irritation of David.
Grappling with my own dilemma over the issue of gender in curating, I could not help asking David if she too had faced the inevitable gender question. Of course, she replied and her answer in 1997 was that at 40, a gender change was out of question and the audience better live with who she was!
Imagine if the previous curators of Kochi Biennale were asked whether their gender came into play in their curatorial frameworks! Was gender a superfluity that could simply be shrugged off by male curators who had the prerogative to focus more on unmarked concerns like poetics, the future of the planet or simply celebration of a new biennale location in the global south?
When women curators mock at being identified by their gender, is it fair to use this as a frame to view the Kochi Biennale of 2018? It is very clear from the concept note of this biennale that gender is one of the many frames that goes into exploring the possibilities for a non-alienated life. In the case of Dube, both gender and the region of Kerala assume salience, given her key role in forming the ‘manifesto’ around the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association (also known as the Kerala Radical Group) in 1987. In her own artistic practice that emerged subsequently, Dube has seldom priced away gender from other power relationships and maintained attention on the poetics of material, you may point out.
I will still persist with my gender question as a heuristic or perhaps as a strategic essentialist move to unpack some of Dube’s curatorial decisions. Gender issues in the context of the Marxist legacy in Kerala have fraught ramifications. Even in Marx’s own writings on alienation, gender hardly featured, paving the way for the Marxist common sense that once class is addressed, gender inequality will automatically be redressed. In this light, foregrounding gender is less to do with essentializing the curator of this year’s Kochi Biennale than an assertion that no political analysis is meaningful if it overlooks the category of gender.
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Let us start with the most upfront nod to the feminist discourse in art history by the curator.
Of all the feminist movements in art history, it is Guerrilla Girls which is prominently signposted at this Biennale. This women’s collective, was formed in 1985 to protest against women artists’ exclusion from a 1984 MoMA exhibition in New York. In their practice, the Guerrilla Girls gave expression to the feminist anger at women’s systematic exclusion from Western art institutions and canon; they mixed fierce images with piercing words to confront the West’s blindness to gender oppression in their iconic posters. The turn to this feminist collective, once a force of subversion and now written into the mainstream feminist art history, is a statement in itself. Does its inclusion in this Kochi Biennale gesture back to the previous editions of this Biennale whose founding curators also faced the criticism of under representation of women artists?
This curatorial move by Dube at once invites a charge of anachronism: why did she turn NOW to the Guerrilla Girls, who were shaped by the 1970s feminism? How does a feminist collective that arose in 1985 speak to the feminist discourse of 2018? Surely, Dube with her interest in art activism and politics of representation, had made this choice after a careful deliberation. Are any of the questions about women artists’ exclusion from the art institutions raised by the Guerrilla Girls not pertinent today in 2018-19? Relevant that this critique may be of objecting to the curator’s turn tothe1970sfeminism,itcan also become facile if we view feminism from the lens of teleology of progress whose objectionable logic has spawned a ridiculous term- “post-feminism.” Post-feminism implies that the question of gender disparity is a thing of the past and the modernist project has concluded successfully for women: they have full political representation; they work in a safe work place; rapes and sexual harassment are obsolete and women have now emerged as full citizens in the global world. Have we really moved on?
Perhaps, we have moved on somewhat in the art world in India since more than a decade. Women artists’ visibility in galleries and museums is no longer an issue. They are being written into art history and monographs on women artists are in circulation and many of whom are already canonized. Yet, many inconsistencies remain. Most glaring is that even as of now, many women artists shy away from being called feminists. Here, a sharp contrast between western and Indian feminism stares at us: in the West, there was a close alliance between women artists/ art historians and women’s movements (Mary Kelly, Griselda Pollock et al), something that had been either missing or remained tenuous (sometimes acknowledged post facto) in India (Achar 2012).
Look how Dube’s curatorial engagement with the Guerrilla Girls makes feminism newly relevant and irrelevant at the same time. They made new works for the Biennale but they appear largely to carry their own North American context.
The Guerrilla Girls’ presence at Kochi had a potentiality for opening a new conversation between the feminism of the north and south but this was foreclosed by their unfamiliarity with the local context. In fact, they performed at the Pavilion soon after the opening of the Biennale which unwittingly turned out to be a hospitable site for the Me Too protest, which has lately been rocking the Indian art world. Quite different from the agenda of the Guerrilla Girls who highlighted women artists’ struggle to enter art institutions, the Me Too Movement brought to the fore sexual harassment that many young women in the art world have always been vulnerable to.
In fact, it is possible to see connections across their agenda as the unequal power structures of the art world that Guerrilla Girls critiqued are precisely the conditions that render young women artists/ women assistants and gallery personnel vulnerable to exploitation by men. It is apparent that the millennial women open to social media are not going to silently suffer and will in fact deploy this very media to expose the abuse of power. With the dismal track record of legal structures in the country, the young feminists took recourse to the tactic of naming and shaming powerful men, a move that has been a point of contention between the older and the younger feminists. The cracks within Indian feminism visible in the wake of the Me Too movement and the Dalit women’s critique of what they perceive as elite feminism have “paved the way for a more intersectional and self-reflexive feminist politics and practice.” (Roy 2018)
“After their performance, a group of artists, writers and curators from South Asia took the mike to read out a statement that they had collectively written during a spontaneous meeting the night before. …The statement asked for transparency in the KMB’s investigation of co-founder Riyas Komu, who stepped down from his position last month after several allegations of sexual harassment were made public by an anonymous Instagram account and taken up by the press….Many in the audience stood up in support of this moment of protest.” (Thomas 2018)
Such a situation creates an anomaly of concerns across the Guerrilla Girls and the women protesters. The former comes across as caught off-guard and unfamiliar with local concerns or the latter is viewed as a blank slate on which Guerrilla Girls inscribe their feminism.
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Rather than debunking the presence of the Guerrilla Girls at this Biennale, let us take it as a provocation for raising further questions to defamiliarise Indian art historiography:
Why have there been no Indian ‘Guerrilla Girls’ before?
Or
When was ‘feminism’ in modern Indian art?
The first question leads us to the route taken by the American feminist art historian, Linda Nochlin who famously asked the question in 1971: Why have there been no great women artists?
Being the most productive feminist question of the last century, it opened up the debates about the politics of canonization and the discourse of greatness that has naturalized women’s inferiority in terms of lacking the phallic nugget of genius. It led to tremendous archival research and sociological study of the past institutions of art and their modes of exclusion. It led to the ground work that created conditions for the Guerrilla Girls to systematically counter the MoMA misogyny through an exhibition and formation of the collective.
What role can the Guerrilla Girls play in India where the debates have had a different starting point? The very term Guerrilla Girls that underwrites the grotesque and anonymity has a different implication for the subcontinent with its history of a colonial past which had provoked the art historian Partha Mitter to produce Much Maligned Monsters (1977). Even anonymity which has a political edge for the Guerrilla Girls has a different valence in south Asian art history if we recall the pioneering art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy’s continual bid for anonymity; it was seen as a decolonizing strategy to critique the West’s celebration of individuality in art. What for the Guerrilla Girls served to challenge the West’s blindness to race (via the trope of the monstrous) and rupture the myth of the male artist as an individual genius (via anonymity) had come to acquire new meaning in postcolonial India.
In India, anonymity has now become a contested site for socially marginalized artists such that biography is being reinstated to give recognition to folk and tribal artists. [2] From the perspective of these artists who have been written out of history, it is the mask of anonymity thrust upon them which has to be wrenched open as a way to lay claim to full citizenship via subjectivity.
The second question alludes to Geeta Kapur’s authoritative book on When was Modernism in Indian Art?
In Kapur’s writings which span a wide range of concerns about the Indian modern, gender enters her frame belatedly. However, in this anthology of essays (2000) produced over a period of time, the belatedness is redressed by placing gender as the opening frame of this work. As it works with the category of gender, itatonceofferscomparativefeminism as a possible framework within which paintings by Amrita Sher-Gil and Frida Kahlo, as for instance, enter into a dialogue.
A more concerted look at gender has been taken up by Gayatri Sinha whose Expressions and Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists of India (1996) marks an important moment in feminist art historiography in India. It plots the significant contribution of Indian women artists of the 20th century while underlining the need to archive their histories and practices.
But the absence of the ‘Guerrilla Girls moment’ in Indian historiography still persists. Neither strong claims of exclusion from the canon nor fierce claims of the politics of representation are part of their narratives as both Kapur and Sinha remain within the class context that these women artists come from. The struggles of these women artists are seen less as institutional than personal.
Is my question about why there have been no guerrilla girls in Indian art falling into the bind of a derivative discourse? Is Indian art historiography supposed to mirror the trends in western art history? No, my question is used more as a provocation to interrogate the absence of a certain politics of representation in India and to further ask: do the Guerrilla Girls enter into a dialogue with feminism as it emerged in this part of the world? Or do they come to the Kochi Biennale, perform and leave? The closest parallel to this mode of strident feminism is not to be found in the Indian art world but within the women’s civil rights movement: the recent Sabarimala activism in Kerala that centered around women’s access to a temple that for centuries was open only to men. Religion emerges as a sphere of feminist activism in which the claims of access to the temple amounts to claims of a secular citizenship. If Guerrilla Girls were seeking access to the museums as ‘temples of art’ in 1980s, the Sabarimala temple activists are asserting their right to enter an actual temple!
The absence of Guerrilla Girls in Indian art history is itself a productive provocation. The Indian modern with its secularist framework drew a sharp line between the ‘temples of art’ and temples of worship. The conditions of Guerrilla Girls were missing in India given the postcolonial nature of early institutions that thrived on state patronage; where nationalism was the overarching framework and Nehruvian socialism tended to recognize class over gender and caste. [3] The stamp of nationalism on popular visual culture is most evident in the posters or calendars featuring Bharat Mata or Mother India: its gender politics -- a creation of male imagination - saw no threat from women as long as they were locked in allegories and placed outside of history. Once India gained freedom from the colonial rule, women who were once at the forefront of the nationalism struggle, were now expected to return to the domestic fold and the larger patriarchal order remained undisturbed.
When we look back, the closest parallel to an early collective of women artists may be found in Through the Looking Glass exhibition of 1987. [4] In the place of Guerrilla Girls, we have four artists: Madhvi Parekh, Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh and Nalini Malani, who had formed a loose affiliation in late 1980s. It was an inaugural moment for Indian feminism even if Ashish Rajadhyaksha who wrote on this show was reluctant to even use the term ‘feminism’. The male critics may have been voicing the apprehension felt by some women artists that the foregrounding of gender risks being bracketed from the mainstream (Achar 2012).
The upfront manifesto and the virulent institutional critique associated with the American Guerrilla Girls appears to be displaced onto another site in the Indian art world. It comes up in the late 1980s with the formation of the Kerala Radical Group. It was none other than Dube who wrote the manifesto and emerged as the most vociferous voice of this leftist group. But way back in late 1980s, on the eve of Indian economy’s liberalization and the global collapse of socialism, this strident manifesto ended up prioritizing class over gender. In Dube’s strong critique of the art world and its capitalist complicities, feminism came in the line of fire and was pushed to the realm of kitsch, irrelevant at best and postmodern at worst. Feminism and postmodernism were aligned and painted with the same brush!
At the 4th Kochi Biennale, Dube fills up this lacuna and redresses the folly of this history. Perhaps, it is here that her anachronistic move towards the Guerrilla Girls may find legibility. From the side of the artists, it is the Polish artist, Goshka Macuga’s printed tapestry You Made Me a Communist which pays a transcultural homage to the women intellectuals and Marxist activists of Kerala. For a change, women remain rooted within the local landscape and the places where they have made history and it is Karl Marx’s tomb that travels to their land in a belated reckoning of their overlooked histories.
At such moments, heaviness lifts and pedagogy and pleasure join hands to reflect on a non-alienated life!
Footnotes:
[1] See a brilliant review of the Kochi Biennale by Arundhati Thomas: “Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life: A Report from the Fourth Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Frieze, 2018.
[2] See Jyotindra Jain’s Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India. Crafts Museum and the Handicrafts and Handlooms Exports Corporation of India, 1998.
[3] The Guerrilla Girls’ focus on race finds a counterpart in caste in the Indian context. Indian Art History’s blindness towards caste has recently been interrogated by S. Santhosh. See “Mapping the Trajectories of Minoritarian Aesthetics and Cultural Politics” in Influx: contemporary art in Asia, Ed. P. D. Mukherji, N. Ahuja and K. Singh, New Delhi: Sage, 2013.
[4] The exhibitions, titled, ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ were held during 1987-1989 first at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal and subsequently at Kala Yatra, Bangalore; Shridharani, New Delhi; Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay and Center for Contemporary Art, New Delhi.
References:
Achar, Deeptha (2012) “‘Invisible Chemistry’ The Women’s Movement and the Indian Woman Artist”, in Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism, Eds. Deeptha Achar and Shivaji Panikkar, New Delhi: Tulika, pp. 219-234.
Chatterjee, Partha (1989): “Colonialism, Nationalism and The Colonised Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist, Vol 16, No 4, pp 622-33.
Dube, Anita (1987) “Manifesto Questions and Dialogue”, Nirukta: A Journal of Art History and Aesthetics, 132-139, 2004.
Geeta Kapur (2000) When was Modernism in Indian Art:EssaysonContemporaryCultural
Practices in India, New Delhi: Tulika.
Rege, Sharmila (1998): “Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of 'Difference' and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 33, No 44.
Roy, Srila (2018) #MeToo Is A Crucial Moment to Revisit the History of Indian Feminism, Vol. 53, Issue No. 42, 20 Oct.
Sarkar, Tanika (2001): Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, London: C Hurst & Co Publishers.
Sinha, Gayatri (1996) Expressions and Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists of India, (ed.) Marg publications.
Tharu, Susie and Tejaswini Niranjana (1994): “Problems for A Contemporary Theory Of Gender,” Social Scientist, Vol 22, No 3-4, pp 93-117.